CARPING POINT: It’s Mother’s Day on Sunday. On a scale of one to 100, it’s probably right up there with Valentine’s Day in terms of buying useless – and overpriced – things for the mother in your life. It’s a horror to get right, writes Kevin Ritchie.
IT’S MOTHER’S Day on Sunday. On a scale of one to 100, it’s probably right up there with Valentine’s Day and Father’s Day in terms of buying useless – and overpriced – things for the mother in your life. It’s a horror to get right.
Restaurants, if you can afford to go out, are normally massively over-subscribed, the kitchen staff are tremendously under pressure and the wait-staff are rushed off their feet. They’ll rush you to finish so that they can seat the next “happy” family, honouring mom, as the teenagers sulk into their smartphones, the babies quall in the prams and everyone shouts over one another to make themselves heard.
And then there are the gifts. How much chocolate can one person eat without going into pre-diabetic shock? How many pairs of fluffy slippers can they wear? It’s a marketer’s wet dream, anything and everything gets advertised under the banner of Mother’s Day. Father’s Day in a couple of weeks’ time isn’t much better; but at least the relentless advertising tends to zero in on beer, braai and brandy, with an obligatory pair of socks thrown in.
At least mothers can eat chocolates. At least they can wear comfy slippers or snuggle into fleecy gowns. Both suggest that they will be sitting back relaxing, reading or watching TV, with their feet up. There could be the obligatory bath salts and smellies for a nice hot bath. It might be schmaltz, but suggests moms getting at least one day off – out of 365 – to be appreciated.
The problem is all the rest of the clutter you have to deal with; unscrupulous retailers crow-barring any “special” anything into Mother’s Day to make it seem more appealing to the less discerning shopper. Dis-Chem hit the Twittersphere this week, after someone posted a picture of a Mother’s Day arrangement at the end of an aisle in one of its stores – it was for cleaning materials; detergents and soaps. But it’s not just Dis-Chem, other retailers and supermarkets are just as guilty of the same practice.
Just like the oke who feels the urge to mansplain something to a woman – even if the woman has a PhD in the topic and he’s just read his WhatsApp on the loo – so too, there is probably some male undermanager in the store who thought it was a winner to group cleaning the house and Mother’s Day into a single concept.
As most husbands who have ever given their wife a toaster or a kettle for their birthday know, you’ll be bloody lucky not to get the thing plugged into the wall and thrown into the bath while you’re lathering up on her bubble bath.
Where’s the outcry from our attention-grabbing politicians who are quick to protest when it’s all about shampoos and mannequins? If we really believed that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, we wouldn’t be expecting them to clean up after us all the time – and cook, and go out and earn and raise the kids.
We really need to do better.
* Kevin Ritchie is a seasoned former newspaper editor and current media consultant. He writes the weekly Carping Point column.
